Lyricist's Lyrical Lyrics: Widening the Scope of Poetry Studies by Claiming the Obvious

Paper from the Conference “Current Issues in European Cultural Studies”, organised by the Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden (ACSIS) in Norrköping 15-17 June 2011. Conference Proceedings published by Linköping University Electronic Press: http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp_home/index.en.aspx?issue=062. © The Author. Lyricist’s Lyrical Lyrics: Widening the Scope 1 of Poetry Studies by Claiming the Obvious Geert Buelens Utrecht University/ Stellenbosch University [email protected] Poetry is all but absent from Cultural Studies. Most treatments of the genre tend to focus on canonized poets whose work is wilfully difficult and obscure. Alternative histories should be explored, opening up possibilities to view poetry again as a culturally relevant art form. The demotic and popular strain provides a case in point. From the Romantics onwards modern poetry linked itself with oral or folk traditions like the ballad. Socially the most popular of these forms is the pop lyric. Since the 1950s rock lyrics have been studied in Social Studies, Cultural Studies, Musicology and some English Departments, but rarely within the context of Poetics or Comparative Literature. Rap and canonized singer-songwriters like Dylan and Cohen are the exceptions to the rule. Systematic attention to both lyrics and performance may open up current ideas of what a poem is and how it works. 1 This article is the non copy-edited draft of a paper presented at the 2011 ACSIS conference ‘Current Issues in European Cultural Studies’, Norrköping, 15-17 June 2011 within the session ‘Revisiting the Literary Within Cultural Studies’. 495 LYRICIST’s LYRICAL LYRICS: WIDENING THE SKOPE OF POETRY STUDIES BY CLAIMING THE OBVIOUS Listen – I’m not dissin but there’s something that you’re missin Maybe you should touch reality KRS-One/Boogie Down Productions, ‘Poetry’ (1987) (in Bradley&DuBois 2010, 145) It is a truism of sorts to claim that Cultural Studies tries to understand the world we live in and to explain how cultural artefacts both reflect and construct that world and its inherent political tensions. Considering the scope and scale of this ambition, it is only logical that our topics of interest and scrutiny tend to be those which can claim some cultural relevance, which are, in other words, to some extent popular. Esoteric art can, of course, be interesting in and of itself, but if you want to understand general cultural trends and evolutions it rarely offers more than a very limited entry. Most scholars in the Humanities still do qualitative research, implying that they do in- depth studies of specific cases. They often fail, however, to explain why they choose one case over another. All too often that choice seems arbitrary. That would not be a problem if we still believed that our particular mini-effort was part of larger super-effort aimed at covering and analysing every cultural artefact that has ever been produced. But that is, obviously, no longer the case. Despite the remarkable proliferation of scholars, research centres and research projects – the program book of this very conference offers a case in point – it should be clear that our academic community will never be able to do more than scratch the surface of an astounding global and historical cultural production. This simple fact should force us to think twice whenever we select a case to study. This has always been a weakness of studies in the Humanities but it is even more problematic within the realm of Cultural Studies, I would argue. Opposed though as Cultural Studies has always been to the apolitical anything goes trends in post-modernism it tends to pick its subjects randomly, hoping the selected case has some symptomatic value. We have become so wary of hierarchies that our unspoken assumption seems to be that every case is as relevant as the other or, if we don’t believe in this kind of cultural relativism, that we should focus on marginalized cultural products in order to give a voice to whatever is oppressed. The scholar of modern poetry faces peculiar challenges in this respect. It should not be hard to argue that modern poetry, in most Western societies, is a marginal, maybe even marginalized genre. (In Hermann Glaser’s Kleine deutsche Kulturgeschichte von 1945 bis heute, for example, it is only mentioned in passing.) Because of its elitist history, however, poetry as a genre cannot claim that ‘marginalized’ status the way ethnic, post-colonial or queer literatures can. Consequently, the genre is remarkably absent from Cultural Studies. In the more than 600 pages of the second edition of Simon During’s Cultural Studies Reader (1999) poetry is mentioned nine times (basically because Walter Benjamin tended to discuss it) and only once one of the authors quotes and discusses an actual stanza. (Television is mentioned 76 times in the book, film 46 times, advertising 41, fashion 21, and opera 10 times; of the major art forms only jazz seems to be in an even direr place than poetry, being only dealt with a mere 5 times, by Adorno – and we all know how he felt about this subject).2 Also, judging by the number of times poetry is dealt with in panels at this conference (twice, once in a session on Bosnia Herzegovina, once in this one), it seems as if poetry as a cultural practice is considered all but irrelevant. This judgement betrays both a geographical and a historical bias. In the current uprisings in 2 Chris Barker’s 2008 Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice does not mention poetry or poems at all. 496 Yemen and Tunisia, for example, poets and public recitations play a more central role than the much hyped Facebook & Twitter. (Bukhari & de Pous 2011) And 95 years ago, during the Easter Rising, poets formed the heart of the Irish revolution. During the First World War, literally millions of poems were written and published as comments, incitements and moments of mourning. (Marsland 1991) From this astounding production most scholars, especially in the English speaking world, have only remembered, studied and canonised poems which originally had a very limited readership and which reflect the highly anachronistic view Western audiences developed about the Great War during the 1960s and 1970s. In other words, for our literary understanding of the First World War, the pacifist movements opposing the Vietnam war seem to have been more important than the actual literary production of the 1910s. (Todman 2005, 153-186) If we were to treat the music scene around May 68 the way we study the poetry of the Great War, we would devote more time to Iannis Xenakis’ Kraanerg than to the Rolling Stones’ ‘Street Fighting Man’ or The Beatles’ ‘Revolution’, just like we rather study Wilfred Owen’s and Isaac Rosenberg’s highly unrepresentative war poems than the popular and actually influential ones by the likes of Jessie Pope or Henry Newbolt, or – in a German context – Ernst Lissauer’s ‘Hassgesang gegen England’, which was actually being taught to German children (An. 1915) and distributed to millions of soldiers. The poems that were actually popular and instrumental in bringing about change in modern societies have rarely been the ones that have been canonised and scrutinized, unless they became anthems in specific nationalist contexts (like the ones by Robert Burns in Scotland, Hungary’s national poet Sándor Petőfi or his counterparts in Poland, the Balkans, the Baltic states or Flanders). These poems’ anthem-like qualities are at odds with the characteristics of most of the poetry of the modern era that ís being anthologized, taught and analysed. Consequently, if there is such a thing as a European canon of modern poetry, it tends to exclude these many National Poets, focusing instead on the very few, mostly French, German and English poets whose poems and poetics inspired the work of the once trendsetting Formalists and New Critics. Most histories or assessments of modern poetry – whether Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik by Hugo Friedrich, Octavio Paz’s Children of the mire, the many studies by Marjorie Perloff or William Marx’s recent Adieu à la littérature - tend to favour and thus canonize these authors and their difficult, often impersonal, indeterminate, Apollonian poems, at the detriment of more social types of poetry. These histories – typically starting with Blake, Hölderlin or Baudelaire, focusing on Rimbaud, Valéry and Pound and ending with Beckett, Celan or the Language poets – sketch a view of modern poetry as a genre which is wilfully difficult and obscure. It has lost its representational function and communicates at best indirectly, presenting a dark and broken world through fragmented pieces of highly metaphorical or even self-referential language. I would like to argue that alternative histories should be explored, opening up possibilities to view poetry again as a culturally relevant art form. Despite the fact that modern poetry from the Romantics onwards linked itself with oral or folk traditions like the ballad this demotic tradition has not received quite as much attention as the esoteric one. Socially the most popular of these forms is the pop lyric, the origins of which are to be situated both in the folk tradition (of British broadside ballads and work songs, and African-American hollers & chants) and the popular music industry (including Tin Pan Alley, but within a European context also music-hall stars like Maurice Chevalier). Since the late 1950s pop and rock lyrics have been studied in Social Studies, Cultural Studies, Musicology and some English Departments, but rarely within the context of Poetics or Comparative Literature.3 Hence, a 3 Frith & Goodwin 1990 gives a great overview and selection. Hinz 2000 provides a German approach.

Load more